Kim

A cannon called Zam-Zammah sits outside the Lahore Museum, and an orphaned Irish boy has claimed it as his throne, burned brown as any bazaar child, answering to a dozen names in a dozen tongues and belonging fully to none of them. Rudyard Kipling built the whole of Kim on that trick of it: a boy who can vanish into any crowd in India, sahib's son and beggar's shadow at once, torn without ever seeming to notice the tearing between a Tibetan lama's search for the River that washes away all sin and the British Great Game that wants his gift for disguise as a weapon. The Grand Trunk Road unspools beneath him, packed with pilgrims, soldiers, horse-traders and thieves, rendered in colour so exact you can smell the dust. What lingers isn't the espionage plot, thrilling as it is, but the ache underneath: a boy so good at being everyone that the question of who he actually is never gets a clean answer, least of all from the boy himself.